Ep 1.5 - Strong, But Still A Little Shy (closed)

[Deleted]

((OOC note: .....no idea where this goes. After Optimus is reasonably repaired, I guess.))

Butterfly (Upswing Mix) was giving Soledad fits. Even on Standard Mode she couldn't get higher than a C, which made her feel like a bad DDR fan. Butterfly was their flagship song, dammit!

...Yes, this was what she did when the other kids were at school and Shadow was on patrol. Everyone had to have a hobby.

Well, banging her head against the Butterfly wall wasn't getting her anywhere. Soledad decided to embrace her inner dork and cued up Miracle Moon, and if Rattrap wandered in and made fun of her then to hell with him. Let's see him get a double A score. Same went for anyone in the whole base. Feeling joyfully defiant, Soledad jumped and stomped out the beat.

The defiant feeling lasted right up until Optimus Prime wandered past and Soledad faltered, ruining her perfect combo. She hadn't exchanged more than two words with the Autobot leader since her arrival and had quietly avoided him since then, sensing some tension off of Shadow towards him that she hadn't asked about. But Smokescreen seemed to think highly of him, and Ironhide and Jazz thought he hung the moon even when Ironhide was mad at him. They were his friends, as much as they could be with their commanding officer.

I wonder if he's lonely.

By the time Miracle Moon ended (with a respectable B), Soledad had made her decision. "Optimus," she called to the Prime's retreating back, spinning the song list idly. "Want to watch me beat my high score?"

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It probably said something about him that Prime didn’t immediately know how to respond to such a question – momentarily flummoxed by the topic of highscores on a dancing game that Miko insisted she detested. The Prime stood, stalled in the hallway just outside the rec room, looking over his shoulder at the human girl who might be embarrassed if he admitted, no, he didn’t really want to watch her beat her highscore on Dance Dance Revolution. If he’d been more distracted, he might have actually said that aloud, but he had the presence of mind just then to edit himself slightly.

The truth was, he probably shouldn’t have been up. He’d come out of recharge violently disoriented, aggro-tech cycled up, systems dumping heat and residual charge into the medical bay and for a full nano-click he’d been terribly certain that whatever fight he’d been remembering was still going on. Then that moment passed and there was just him, the welds across his chest, and his badly corrupted memory files – bleeding archived sensor data into his neural net while he was in shut down. It took a cycle to torque it down and by then he was far beyond regaining shut down.

And so he was here. He’d passed Soledad without comment to activate a code compile in the control room, then left it to its work, walking back past the rec-area to return to medical. He’d intended that Ratchet not know he’d been up. Instead he was contemplating Soledad and her game. Mostly he was remembering what Fowler had been telling him about Soledad’s unique position of semi-nonexistence. “Won’t lie to you, Prime. She shouldn’t be here. The problem is there’s no one to take responsibility for her and, frankly, she knows too much.” Which was ominous sounding until June Darby had amended, “We’re still trying to figure out a housing situation for her, but maybe after NEST and Team Prime is less busy hunting down the Nemesis. For now, she doesn’t seem to have anyone else.”

Optimus wondered if she was lonely.

“Only if my presence does not distract you from your objective.”

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Soledad grinned at him, a strange sort of excitement fizzing through her veins. A little thrill of performance, a little flirting with danger, all adrenaline. "Awesome," she pronounced, and chose a song.

She could feel/hear Optimus's presence at her back as Dive's opening bars filled the room - muffled by distance and by heavy armor, but unmistakable nevertheless. Even if he was only being polite, it was nice to have an audience. I wonder if he'd play, if we got a controller big enough for him. It'd probably feel like an earthquake on base if he played anything harder than Basic mode. Do Cybertronians even dance?

No more time to contemplate. Soledad took a deep breath and gave herself to the arrows.

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Optimus felt certain there were games like this one in the arcade blocs of Cybertron. That was the first of several thoughts that crossed the Prime’s mind as Soledad engaged a quite a lot of enthusiastic stomping around on light-up arrows. She was entirely absorbed in her game and did not, to Optimus’ eye, seem to notice how closely he was or was not observing her endeavor. This was, point of fact, the first time that he and Soledad had been exclusively in each other’s company; all times previous Soledad was generally preoccupied with the other children, Nurse Darby, Agent Fowler, or one of the other members of Team Prime.

It remained somewhat unclear to Optimus what business, if any, he had being around adolescent humans placed questionably under his protection. That said, Soledad was uniquely afflicted by both an unstable legal background and having been singled out by a Decepticon officer for torment. Whereas Miko, Jack, and Raf had simply been witness to fights among ground troops, Soledad had been in the Nemesis itself. In that respect, it was entirely possibly Soledad could never feel safe again anywhere but in the presence of the heavily armored and utterly alien opposition – in particular her attachment to Shadowrunner was strong and Agent Fowler agreed, for now, this was the best temporary solution.

That didn’t necessarily mean Optimus agreed Omega One was the best place for her – though the alternative, he suspected, was military witness protection enacted by strangers. Mostly, he found Soledad hopping on arrows to be a reminder, again, of the many reasons he detested Starscream.

“What score are you trying to beat?” He hoped the question did not distract her too terribly, but she seemed to have her high-score well in hand.

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This time Soledad didn't miss a step when Optimus spoke; she grinned fiercely at the screen as a steady stream of "Perfect"s filled the display. "See that counter on the bottom left? Every time I hit an arrow I get points. The more accurate I am the more points I get." She paused to blaze through a difficult flurry of steps as the song approached its bridge. "I'll get extra points with a long combo - that's how many steps in a row I get a Great accuracy or above on - and if I end the song with a full life gauge. That's the thing on the top," she added. Hop, step, step-step-jump. "It goes down if I miss a step. If it goes down all the way? Game over."

No possibility of game over here. The song was drawing to a triumphant close, and Soledad danced with it, hair tossing, hands lifted until the last steps ended with her falling backwards, onto the couch with a laugh of triumph. She didn't even need the game to tell her, but when it exclaimed, "Wow! It's a new record!" she pumped a fist in the air.

"And that's how it's done!" she announced. "Still the DDR champion of Omega One! Not that that's saying much. Jack's got two left feet, Miko keeps choosing Heavy mode and getting her ass kicked and Raf just plain isn't interested." She craned her head back to grin at her audience. "I wish we had Autobot-sized control mats. Do Cybertronians even dance? ...If you don't mind my asking," she added belatedly. Cybertron, and what Cybertronians did there, tended to be a tricky thing to talk about, and Optimus Prime was less inclined to make small talk than most. Or as far as she could tell. For all she knew he was a chatterbox when the humans weren't around.

[Deleted]

“I do not mind,” said Prime mildly. “And we do.”

Optimus’ tone suggested that by ‘we’ he meant ‘Cybertronians, not me’ but Soledad’s question was… strangely welcome. Uncomfortable as it sometimes was to speak of what was no longer in existence, the memory and the speaking of it was all that really remained now. Keeping the history of it alive in the telling… was a comfort to him at the least.

The combination of watching Soledad and an absent Google-search had filled in the Autobot Commander on the nature of the game, it history, its operation, and rules, and variable sub-cultures attached to it. Soledad’s victory and collapse into the couch was very reminiscent of Jack and Miko’s various video game triumphs and, in truth, not so different from the arcade blocks of most Cybertronian metropolitain sprawls. That said, the word ‘arcade’ on earth evoked a singular establishment and, like many human parallels to Cybertronian culture, it was a far narrower and smaller thing. An ocean of holo-light, large as a small city, evoked the arcade of Iacon.

“Though many forms of it may not be immediately recognizable to your species as such.” He seemed to think over his previous remark a moment before adding: “Bumblebee and Jazz might better enlighten you about cross-cultural adaptation, however.”

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Soledad chuckled. "That's cool. I know I can con Jazz into showing me some dances." Who knew, maybe she could learn a few steps herself. As long as Cybertronian dancing didn't involve transforming, at least. She probably couldn't simulate that.

She stretched, feeling the burn and ache in her muscles. She still didn't get a lot of fresh air these days, but the exercise felt good. "Mmmh... yeah, I couldn't really picture you at a rave party, but like, what the hell do I know, right? Ironhide surprised me, when I got to know him better." She smiled as she relaxed out of her stretch. "You probably would too."

She sat up and turned around to face him, kneeling on the couch cushion with her arms draped over the back. "So? What kind of music do you like? What's on your radio when you go for your drives? Rap? K-pop? Country~?" She drew out the last word and giggled. "Sorry. Teasing."

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Optimus, despite Soledad’s claim to be joking, appeared to nevertheless consider her question. He decided not to tell her that he tended to tune into several dozen radio stations at once, finding the multi-source of signals to be a relaxing simulacrum of direct data feeds back on Cybertron, a recreational version of the data-sorting he’d been originally tasked with in his time at the Hall of Records. Optimus, despite his inclination toward peace and quiet, was disinclined to total radio silence. He wasn’t sure how to express a preference for noise in general as opposed to genre.

“I… have no preference in particular,” said Optimus after a moment. “Human music is different from that of Cybertron. It is dissonant in a manner that Cybertronian cross-frequency harmonics are not. It is… interesting.” He considered Soledad and her game, the bright arcade-Technicolor glow casting a small yellow nimbus across the catwalk, the faint chime of the pause screen burbling quietly. Then, after a moment, “Ironhide has an Earth music preference?”

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Soledad burst out laughing. That hadn't been quite what she'd meant, but the expression on Optimus's face-! "Ironhide has a preference!" she declared, hopping up to stand on the cushion. "His preference iiiiiis... anything but whatever Jazz happens to be playing over his speakers at the time." Her pose faltered as she dissolved into giggles, and she flopped down again. "Which means his tastes are as eclectic as Jazz's are, 'cause Jazz listens to everything he can download. Even the weird stuff."

She folded her arms over the back of the couch, peeking up at Optimus sidelong. "Was he always like that? A pack rat with music, I mean." she asked casually. Maybe she could coax a story out of him.